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Article by Yinan Chen (Archbob)
n this environment of high unemployment, a career of self-employment via e-commerce may be the best route to take. One of the paths you can take in this field is to start your website and make a living by either selling advertising space on the website or by selling products. However, before you can start making a real living salary, you need to do some basic groundwork in the marketing area to get traffic. This article will give you some tips of how to plan your promotion from the ground up, starting with buying a domain name for your website.
Step 1: Buying the domain name
This actually takes a lot of thought. The name you choose should depend on your goals. You could choose a catchy name like Google did, but you can also choose a more practical domain name with the keywords you are targeting. Choosing a catchy name that is unrelated to your site content may help build branding but it will make initial SEO work much harder. For this reason, I suggest you choose a domain with your keywords in the domain. For instance, since I was targeting Flash games and Tower Defense as my keywords, I choose domains with those keywords in them. When people link to your domain, they most likely will use your domain name as the anchor text, so having your keywords in your domain will give you a huge boost. Which keywords to choose is also very important and could have a very big effect on how much SEO traffic you will get. The main contention here is whether to choose a very broad and popular term like “flash games” that is hard to rank well for or choosing a niche term like “Tower defense” which does not get as many searches but is easier to rank for because of less competition. I suggest you use the Google insights for search tool to find good keywords to target. Sometimes putting another often-used word behind your initial keywords will help your results. For instance if you buy a domain like freegamesplay.com(don’t try, domain is already taken), you will rank high for “free games” as well as “free games play”. The second term does not get nearly the same number of searches as the first, but will be a small boost in traffic. You need to be creative in this aspect to have success in SEO.
Step 2: Site Navigation Structure
While the design of a site is important, I find that the navigational structure of a site actually has more impact on how it will fair in the search engines. Large sprawling navigational structures that include a decent amount of categories for content and those designs that allow for a decent amount of text do fairly well. Keyword density is a term I seem to hear a lot these days. Stacking keywords on your frontpage and subsequent pages does not actually seem to do that well. You need to have a fair amount of keywords on your pages, but don’t repeat them again and again for the sake of having them there.
Having a keyword cloud or tags incorporated into a design in the way wordpress does seems to help a lot. If you are designing and developing a site, I recommend doing something similar.
Step 3: Social Networks and link exchange
While facebook may be the 900lb gorilla in the field and you should have a facebook fan page, using other networks like Digg, Reddit, and stumbleupon will help you more in the immediate phase of marketing. Get friends with accounts at these places to digg, reddit, and stumble your unique content for you and submit each time you have fresh, unique content. You might also try to buy some diggs/stumbles/etc but thats a tricky matter and if you don’t handle it well, it may end up costing you more than you can make back from it.
Link exchanging is also a sticky matter. I personally don’t do it much anymore but when you are first starting, it can be a big boost. Although, PR is not that important in Google rankings anymore, it is the best indicator when you link exchange. I would suggest waiting until you actually have a PR(pagerank) before you start link exchanging as many people will want to see some PR before they are willing to link exchange with you. Keep your link exchanges to a few and keep track of who is exchanging with you. There are many people who will try trading links and then taking your link off after a while hoping you don’t notice. You cannot afford to give these one-way links. Using social networks and link exchanging will help you get your site spidered deep into Google and other search engines and will help jump-start your site. Also, don’t forget to submit to directories like dmoz.org as these directories still hold some important when it comes to counting backlinks.
Step 4: Research competitors and copy
So this is the step that many people simply do not do or disregard but is very important. This will let you find out how some of the top sites in your field are becoming popular and may even let you copy some of their methods. The easiest way is to go to google.com and type in “link:www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com”. This will show you where their backlinks are coming from. Many will be free directories that you can submit to yourself. Do not hesitate to submit to these same directories as every link you gain will help. I would suggest not doing link exchanges with these directories as they are often just link directories with no other real content. You will also find many website review sites that you can get free links and traffic from. Another place to gain link traction is to post comments in blogs leaving your link and anchor text as a signature. You will have to look for blogs that don’t have the “nofollow” feature enabled. Do not spam comments and only post 1 comment a day or so to each blog. Make sure the comment is on topic and well-thought. If you post useless comments, you will be banned or blocked and your comments will be deleted. You should also create your own blog related to your site topic and give frequent updates.
Another thing you will find that some top sites do is that they do to places like yahoo questions and find questions related to their site topic and will answer those questions while leaving links to their signature. Don’t actually answer unless you actually have a good and helpful answer. People are far more likely to follow your links if you have something helpful to share. You can also go to places like alexa.com and quantcast.com to glean some other information about top competitors and get an idea of how they got there. Copying the methods of your successful rivals is always in your favor.
Step 5: Make new content to pull in visitors and retain them
To keep attracting new visitors and to retain old ones, you will need new content. This can come in the form or articles, flash cartoons, products, or whatever else fits the category of your site. These things need to be promotional in nature. Writing fresh articles with a few of your link in them is great as it helps build links to your site and gets you noticed within the industry if the articles are quality articles. Making a flash cartoon or game to promote your product or service can really help it take off and go viral, especially if it gets received well at Newgrounds or Kongregate. Making catchy youtube videos is also a great idea. Most of these things can be done for free. All you need is something like Openoffice(free) to write articles. To make flash content, you can either download the 30 day free-trial of the official IDE development environment for adobe or you can download the flashdevelop and the flash SDK, which is totally free. You can also get swishmax for $100 which is less powerful than the official IDE, but still has powerful tools to let you create toons and games. For drawing and graphics, use GIMP(free). For youtube, you can use web hypercam(I see a lot of unregistered ones these days). The methods I advocate are all free and can be used by anyone. If you have funds, you can look at banner exchange places and paid ads like Google adwords. That is a another whole topic by itself and I will not cover it here because it involves complexities like tracking conversion rates, ratios, and ROI numbers for each campaign. Also, not everyone has a lot of money to promote their new business.
If you follow the advice in these four steps carefully and plan out what your main strategy is in advance, you will be fairly successful with your new website. It is a slow process so not being successful overnight is to be expected. It can take months or even years to become really successful even with good planning, so make sure you are in it for the long haul.
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